Friday roundup

There are so very, very many advice columnists and etiquette writers out there. I should know who they all are, but I don’t. I’d never heard of Amy Alkon, for example, a California etiquette & advice lady who takes a vigilante approach to manners policing. From the New York Times:

A peep does not exactly describe what Ms. Alkon did a few years ago after deciding Range Rovers, Chevy Tahoes and Cadillac Escalades had become a nuisance in her gentrifying neighborhood. She printed cards and tucked them under windshield wipers. They read in part: “Road-hogging, gas-guzzling, air-fouling vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis, or you wouldn’t drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics.”

The cards listed a phone number (since disconnected) on which she continued the rant with a recorded message. “Piggy, piggy, piggy,” it started

Read the entire article, she sounds like a dreadful person. But she’s got a syndicated column and I don’t, and she wrote two books and I’ve written one. Coincidence? At any rate, the article would be a good jumping-off point for a discussion about being nice versus being good. Ms. Alkon believes she is doing good, even if it means not being nice about it. We all know situations exist where you have to be the complainer, the buzzkill, the un-goer-along, in order to do the right thing. Agreement on what, exactly, those situations might be, is a different matter.

Another NYT article that’s been haunting me is this one about the parents of troubled sons:

Shootings in places like Isla Vista, Calif., and Newtown, Conn., have turned a spotlight on the mental health system, and particularly how it handles young, troubled males with an aggressive streak. About one in 100 teenagers fits this category, according to E. Jane Costello, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Duke University School of Medicine, and they often have multiple diagnoses and are resistant to treatment.

Most of these young men will never commit a violent crime, much less an atrocity. But the questions of how best to help them and how to pay for it are among the most intractable problems hanging over the system.

Thousands of families know this experience too well: No single diagnosis fits, no drug brings real relief, and if the teenager rejects the very idea of psychotherapy, there is little chance of lasting improvement.

Shorter version: Nothing works, and the families can’t afford it anyway. They simply live with a ticking time bomb. There are over 800 comments on the article. Some are from families that have troubled members like this. Some are from people whose lack of empathy is almost as terrifying as the disturbed young men portrayed in the article.

Slate looks at another aspect of developmental psychology: The fact that so many of the studies are done on the babies and children of privileged, mostly white Westerners:

While other children play “House” or “Doctor,” these Berkeley kids have been known to play a game called “Research.” One child holds a clipboard and asks other children to “play a game” while the child observes them and pretends to jot down notes. Some of these children have told me about their international travels, and several of the 3-year-olds have told me they can read.

Meanwhile, Emily Bazelton argues that these kids, and many others like them, are getting the clear message from their parents that achieving is more important than caring for other people:

While most parents and teachers have told other researchers in the past that they rank children’s capacity for caring above achievement, kids don’t believe them.I don Four out of five of the teens Making Caring Common surveyed said their parents cared more about achievement or happiness than caring. They saw teachers this way, too.

I don’t think parents are deliberately setting out to turn their kids into miniature Gordon Gekkos, but this rings true to me. Middle-class parents are nervous about their kids’ futures, reasonably so. There’s a lot of pressure to do well academically, to develop the toughness and work ethic that our competitive labor market demands. Also, it’s straight-up easier to praise and call attention to achievements. Trophies and prizes and scores are objective and easily interpreted and occur regularly. Empathy is harder to quantify and more difficult to interpret (was your kid being nice or a pushover, really?) and doesn’t occur on a neat schedule of standardized tests or away-v.-home games.